Airbus extends real-time collaboration to global customers and remote suppliers

Airbus is now successfully running collaborative product development environments with both customers and suppliers for new bespoke A380 passenger and freighter projects. The European group has now extended its PTC Windchill digital mock-up (DMU) system – a key element of the Airbus Concurrent Engineering (ACE) initiative – allowing customers to interact with aspects of their aeroplanes much earlier in the design phase. As part of the Airbus Extended Enterprise system, engineers in Toulouse and at customer sites are now managing mock-up reviews together in real time using web browser access, resulting in reduced manufacturing lead times and helping to ensure early conformance to customer requirements. Berry Gibson, PTC’s aerospace and defence strategy director, says: “It’s engineer to engineer, as well as the marketing folks – looking at size, spaciousness and layout, with walk throughs. There’s much less need for physical interaction at customers sites.” It’s a significant advance on the earlier implementation, which dates back to Airbus’ massive Windchill purchase in the summer of 2000 that ultimately enabled thousands of engineers, spread across Europe and separated by different processes, systems and languages to develop, engineer and manufacture the world’s largest civil aircraft in record time. And it doesn’t stop there. Hundreds of Airbus suppliers are being offered bundled PTC software for direct digital design integration for product development. Based on PTC’s Division Mock-Up & Reality system, it’s allowing designs to be reviewed, simulated and shared digitally across Europe in a realistic workspace. Says Gibson: “Up to now suppliers have been co-located, but now they’re going back to their respective businesses and suppliers will adopt Windchill solutions of their own to collaborate on, for example, detailed design for major outsourced components.” Gibson makes the point that the system is CAD-neutral – managing a mix of PTC’s CAD products and multiple versions of others’ CAD systems across the users. Engineers at different sites around the world can thus work with their own CAD to load complete sections of an aircraft on-screen and to check, for example, interferences between sub-assemblies. It’s all done through mock-up integrators, with designers and manufacturing engineers working simultaneously on DMUs, using various configured views before releasing designs for manufacturing and assembly. Windchill also provides configuration management and controls all change and release processes so the DMU is under formal configuration management. “Windchill manages the BoM [bill of materials], the product assembly structure and all its variants – millions of potential parts,” explains Gibson. “The system manages right down to individual planes: all the CAD models and CAD drawings and everything else with change control against a baseline – managing approvals, reviews, impact analysis and ultimately closing them out. It’s the first time this has been done with DMUs.” “Airbus has become the benchmark in innovative and collaborative aerospace engineering and manufacturing,” says Dick Harrison, president and CEO of PTC. “Our ability to support Airbus’ globally distributed product development process, across multiple companies and geographic regions, is a strong validation of our vision, our approach and our offerings to the industry.”